Fedora Weekly News Issue 264

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 264[1] for the week ending February 23, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

This week's issue begins with details on this week's Graphics Test Week and how to participate. In Development announcements, an update from the Docs team in Fedora 15 alpha release notes readiness, and the decision to let the release of Fedora 15 Alpha slip one week. Two articles in this week's Fedora In the News include German coverage of Fedora 16's inclusion of btrfs for volume management, and coverage of the decision to package SQLNinja in Fedora. In Ambassador news, notice of two new Ambassadors, to the Italian and Sri Lankan teams, a wonderful summary of conversation on the Ambassadors and FAmSCo lists this past week, and several events from Ambassadors around the globe. More details on the Fedora Localization Project move to Transifex.net open this week's Translation team news, along with new members and teams of the FLP. Our issue wraps up with a review of the security-related packages released this past week for Fedora 13 and 14. Enjoy!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues[2] on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

Testing is very easy and can be done entirely with a live image, there's no need to install F15 or Rawhide; full instructions are available on the Wiki pages. QA folks and graphics developers will be in #fedora-test-day during the events. These test days are super-important this release because we'll be checking out the support for GNOME Shell, one of the major features of F15; we really need to get a good idea of the state of hardware support for the Shell, so PLEASE do come out and help test if you have any spare time this week! Also please help spread
the word anywhere you can - your local enthusiast community, any news websites you know, particularly ones in non-English languages (as I'm not great at covering those).

There's a longer write-up on my blog[5]. Please get in touch with me directly or the test mailing list if you have any questions or suggestions. Thanks!"

Alpha Release Notes Prep

"The docs team is preparing the Alpha release notes, we would like to
ask that developers check their feature pages[2] to make sure it
contains the most up to date information. We use these pages to create
the release notes so it's important that the information is up to
date, and no one knows about developing features more than the
developers themselves. We appreciate your help and the time spent
making Fedora so great. Thanks!"

notification-daemon autostart changes

"I'm going to build notification-daemon 0.7.1 as an F15 update; this release changes the way the daemon is started.

In the past, it was bus activated on the session bus and exited after some idle time. This was causing a race condition with gnome-shell taking the same bus name at session start to support notifications.

Starting with 0.7.1, the notification daemon is no longer bus activated, and does not exit on its own. Desktop environments that use it to provide notifications have to ensure it gets started in some way; gnome-session will start it as a required component of the fallback
session."

Fedora 15 Alpha to slip by one week

"Today at the Go/No-Go meeting[3] we decided to slip the Alpha by one week.

The slip is due to a blocker bug affecting a number of non-US keyboard
layouts, including German and French[4], which does not currently have a
fix or a reasonable workaround. All other blocker bugs are currently in
VERIFIED, or alternately, have workarounds documented in F15_Common_bugs.

At this time, we are not adjusting later milestone dates.

We will continue with the F15 Alpha readiness meeting tomorrow, as
previously announced on the logistics mailing list, and will have
another F15 Alpha Blocker Bug meeting Friday.

Thanks for your understanding. We will meet again next week for another
GO/NO-GO meeting."

Fedora Events

Fedora events are the exclusive and source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Fedora to include hacking tool Sqlninja after all (H Online)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1] an an article in The H Online about the decision to include sqlninja in the Fedora distribution:

"As recorded in the minutes of the most recent meeting of the Fedora
board, the Fedora Project is to integrate hacking tool sqlninja into its
Linux distribution. The minutes record that Tom 'spot' Callaway, member
of the Fedora board and Fedora Engineering Manager, met with Red Hat's
legal team who said they considered there was no risk involved in
including sqlninja. The Fedora board voted unanimously to lift the block
on the application"

John Rose posted a proposal [14] on "Broadening how we empower community action - opening a dialog for change" with a context around budget creation, allocation, approval and disbursement processes in community activities not limited to Ambassadors. The thread [15] includes replies from current FAmSCo members and Ambassadors discussing about the need to streamline the process for identifying a requirement for budget, approval thereof and, disbursal that allows proper tracking.

Pierros Papadeas posted [25] Meeting Minutes [26] of FAmSCo meeting on 2011-02-19. Max Spevack provided some clarity [27] by answering a few questions raised on the thread [28] around budget for community activities

Summary of events reported on Ambassadors mailing list

Shakthi Kannan posted a report [2] along with photographs [3] on the EFY Expo 2011 at New Delhi, India [4]. He also included a link to his presentation [5] on "Free/Open Source Hardware - What it means to Design Engineers"

Max Spevack asked for help [5] from someone familiar with LATAM Fedora Ambassadors to understand the context of an expenses ticket [6]. Igor Pires Soares followed up [7] providing the information needed.

Joerg Simon forwarded [8] a mail from Mahay Alam Khan adding himself as a Regional Mentor for APAC and added his observations. Susmit Shannigrahi answered [9] a question from Larry Cafiero about who Mahay Alam Khan was. He further suggested [10] asking on the fedora-bd list about the need for a Mentor for Bangladesh.

Translation

FLP Infrastructure to Move to Transifex.net

Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith made the official announcement of the migration of the Fedora Translation Infrastructure from Fedora Servers to Transifex.net[1]. The move has been met with a mixed response. Members of the Fedora Infrastructure team have welcomed the move citing that it would provide a more stable system for the FLP. Translators and members of the Fedora Documentation team have both welcomed as well as expressed anguish at the loss of the key infrastructure element from Fedora's self-hosted space. Some members have also expressed that the move could have been
postponed until the release of Fedora 15 and alternatives plan to better maintain the current self-hosted system evaluated during that time[2].

The Translation Team coordinators have been requested to create their Fedora Translation teams on transifex.net[3]. Translators would be required to join the teams as members and also re-sign the CLA[4].

Ricky Zhou has highlighted the benefits that Developers (control how and when the translated content can be integrated), System Admins (stability ensured by the main developers of the system) and Translators (stable system with translations held in upstream repository) will be able to enjoy due to the move[5].

Fedora Documentation team member, Ruediger Landmann volunteered to help stabilise the current system[6]. Domingo Becker informed the current status of the upgradation process[7]. However, it has been expressed that since transifex-client would not be used on the Fedora Servers, it runs the risk of not being maintained as a Fedora package either[8].

Hebrew team coordinator Oron Peled put forward some important points that include fully understanding why the Fedora Infrastructure team found it more difficult to maintain the Transifex system. Also he highlights that due to a lack of consumption, interaction about technical issues with the upstream maintainers may reduce and result in a loss for transifex to better stabilize itself as a product[9].

As a response to the suggestions for a future exit plan, Jared Smith informed that it would be re-evaluated if a stable system and software is available that justifies the transition[10]. However, this option would not be explored before the release of Fedora 15[11].

Unlike the transifex versions used on translate.fedoraproject.org until now, the new version used on transifex.net does not commit the translations directly into the devel-repositories of the main package. Instead it holds the translations in a self-hosted repository and developers can pull the translations from this repository into the main devel-repository[12].

Copyright Information and Comments Deleted from .PO files on transifex.net

Finnish team member Ville-Pekka Vainio informed about a bug in the submission system on transifex.net, due to which the Copyright information and other comments in a submitted .PO file is erased after submission[1]. This bug is being traced on transifex bug tracking system.

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